January 13-19, 2005

artpicks

Remembering the Lost

by John Vettese

Taken out of context, it merely looks like an oven. Foreboding and dark, but an oven all the same. View it in the company of the other 87 images in British photographer Michael Kenna's series Impossible To Forget, and it will make your stomach drop. This is Mauthausen, a concentration camp in Austria. The lens is looking into a crematorium, and over 100,000 people died here.

Half a century after WWII, many former Nazi camps — Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald — have been converted into memorials. And as anyone who has visited them can attest, the greatest sense of disquiet comes not from film footage or historic photographs, but from the sense of unsettling stillness in walking the grounds, through vacant relics of barracks and guard houses. This is what Kenna manages to capture in his work, shot at a variety of sites between 1988 and 2000. Steering away from the more commonplace "Arbeit Macht Frei" imagery, he'll look at subtler things: a train track forking off into an unloading ramp at Birkenau; moonlight careening through a misty barbed wire fence at Natzweiler-Struthof in France; an SS guard house, or "death gate," in the distance (pictured). And occasionally, he'll slip away from the understated post-industrial look into blatant depictions of the Holocaust, like the pile of victims' shoes at Lublin-Majdanek in Poland. Ultimately, the show serves the same purpose as the memorials: a grim reminder of the atrocities committed and a plea for humanity to never let them happen again.

"Impossible To Forget: The Nazi Camps Fifty Years After," Jan. 15-April 10, Michener Art Museum, 138 S. Pine St., Doylestown, 215-340-9800, www.michenerartmuseum.org.

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